A complete notation for Ada charts

Abstract

Several attempts have been made to define notations for diagrams that can represent the structure of an Ada program in terms of the interaction between its packages and tasks 1, 2, 3 . While handling the issue of visibility fairly well, none of these gives any guidance for the more difficult areas of Ada, such as generics, task creation and exceptions. The notation described here is complete. It employs a few carefully chosen features in a consistent way to construct an easily understandable chart of an Ada system. The notation is adaptable for use by hand or by computers with graphic capabilities.